Listening to conservatives right now is a fascinating exercise in cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, many of them are convinced that Sarah Palin has revolutionized not only this election, but American politics and even our cultural life. She’s said to have single-handedly reversed the terrible prospects of congressional Republicans, for example. John McCain can barely stand to be out of her presence.
But on the other hand, she’s still a poor, downtrodden victim, “the object of the most vicious and concerted smear campaign in modern American history,” as one of the bloggers at PowerLine puts it. And the latest whine, predictably articulated by Michael Gerson in his Washington Post column, is that “liberals” are smearing her religion, making her not just a victim, but a martyr.
Like most of the whining about poor (yet triumphant) Palin, Gerson’s piece does not deign to offer a single example of or source for the alleged attacks on Palin’s faith, beyond a sneer about “reporters” asking Palin’s pastor if she’s ever spoken in tongues. “[L]iberals have been drawn, helpless and mesmerized — like beetles to the vivid, blue paradise of the bug zapper — toward criticizing Sarah Palin’s religion,” he says. And then Gerson is off to the races, with several hundreds words of abuse for the “secularists” who don’t know that charismatic Christianity is a big deal these days. The clincher is Gerson’s identification of these unnamed liberals with those who derided the early Christians.
Who? Where? Can we get a name here? A direct quote? Has Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or Nancy Pelosi, or David Axelrod mocked Palin’s religion?
As for those “reporters” who asked if Palin had spoken in tongues, how, exactly, does this represent persecution? Sarah Palin is the first self-identified Pentecostal Christian to appear on a national party ticket. Simple questions about the nature of her faith are no more unnatural than the questions asked of Jimmy Carter back in 1976 about his “born-again” evangelicalism, or the questions posed to John F. Kennedy in 1960 about his support for church-state separation. And if Gerson’s right, and pentecostalism is far more typical of Americans than the “liberal Episcopalianism” he sneers at, why should she be offended by non-derisive questions, and hide her light under a bushel?
Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running-mate touched off some of the most excited celebrations on the Christian Right that we’ve seen since the election of Ronald Reagan. Fine, but they can’t have it both ways, touting her as a revolutionary, redemptive figure in American politics and then complaining the minute someone notices that her views on the nexus of politics and faith seem to be central to her appeal to conservatives.
As a Christian myself (though one of those “liberals” that Gerson and other conservatives contemptuously dismiss, in what I might choose to construe as a vicious attack on my religion), Gerson’s column and many others like it exemplify one of the most unsavory characteristics of contemporary conservative Christianity: self-pity combined with vengefulness. The best example is the ludicrous annual rite of “War on Christmas” whining, where Christians who have never suffered a moment of real discrimination in their lives complain about department store signs and launch boycotts to force compliance with their tender sensibilities.
Throughout the history of the Christianity, people have actually suffered and actually died for their faith in Jesus Christ. I seriously doubt that many conservative Christians in America share the phony sense of persecution that their “spokesmen” like Michael Gerson encourage them in, or view themselves as martyrs. Nor should they or anyone else buy into this effort to turn Gov. Sarah Palin into St. Joan of the Tundra, even as she is said to vanquish all foes in her colossal path.